Bluegrass Underground mixes cool cave experience with music

Bluegrass band Cadillac Sky performs in the Volcano Room at Cumberland Caverns for a Bluegrass Underground show (photo: Shelley Mays/The Tennessean).

The Tennessee Mafia Jug Band’s Leroy Troy brought out his banjo and twirled it in the air working the crowd of about 400 fans with his band mates as they shared classic bluegrass and ’40s-era country music songs such as “Whoa Mule” and “Hillbilly Fever.” It was like any other show the Jug Band might play with one exception: They played in a cave, 333 feet underground.

Cumberland Caverns’ volcano room in McMinnville, Tenn., serves as home to Bluegrass Underground, a live country and bluegrass show that features a monthly mix of up-and-comers and established stars.

Cherryholmes, Justin Townes Earle, John Cowan Band, Mike Farris and the McCrary Sisters and Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder have all made the trek into the cave. At the Jug Band’s recent show, they were joined by a group of cloggers from Cookeville, Tenn., and Rodney Dillard and the Dillard Band. (Dillard played a member of family band The Darlings on The Andy Griffith Show.)

“We love coming here,” said Jug Band guitarist Mike Armistead. “We’re seeing a huge fan base for us, and as long as they keep calling and asking us back, we’ll be back.”
Fans seem fascinated with the cave experience, too. They line up at the gift shop at least an hour before show time and wait to be escorted on the 20-minute walk down a gravel road, through the cave mouth and into the volcano room. Once there, they perch on picnic tables, folding chairs and rocks that jut out from the cave walls, and they listen to music and grab snacks from the snack bar.

Phillip and Rhonda Feibish from Atlanta are so taken with the Bluegrass Underground experience that the couple has made the three and a half hour drive to see nearly every show for two years now.

“My wife and I are music fans but not really bluegrass fans, so we really didn’t know a lot about it,” Feibish said. “We would go to the concerts and just sit down and the music was so wonderful. It was this whole world of music we know nothing about. We get CDs and ride home listening to them. It’s been the most exciting thing.”

Origins and growth

Bluegrass Underground’s origins trace back to show producer Todd Mayo. Mayo, who works in advertising, was looking for a show to promote that featured bluegrass and acoustic music. When he saw the volcano room in 2008 on a family trip to Cumberland Caverns, he was struck by its potential.

“It just occurred to me what a beautiful place it could be for music,” he recalled. “When we got done with the tour I said to the tour guide, ‘Do you all ever have live music here?’ And she was like, ‘Nah but that’d be a good idea.’ ”

Mayo cleared his plan with the cave’s general manager, lined up a sponsorship through Ascend Federal Credit Union and convinced WSM to broadcast his potential bluegrass show. Then he brought sound engineers in to investigate the space and make sure it was acoustically adequate.

“They confirmed what I hoped and suspected, that the acoustics down here are phenomenal,” Mayo said. “It’s world class. It’s almost akin to going to see a live concert in a recording studio.”

With that assurance, he booked The Steeldrivers as the first act on Aug. 16, 2008, and Bluegrass Underground was born.

“We sat there after the first show and said, ‘Man, we could do this show for 25 years,’ ” Mayo said.

In the early days, the accompanying radio show aired at midnight on Fridays. Today, the two-and-a-half hour shows are produced and turned into three one-hour weekly radio shows that air Saturday nights on WSM right before the Grand Ole Opry.

Mayo also is hoping to turn Bluegrass Underground into a PBS series. The first season of the proposed show was filmed in February and May of this year with Ricky Skaggs and others, and the taping drew more than 900 people. (Watch videos of the pilot below.)

Ideally, Mayo said he’d like the series to feel like a mix of live music institution Austin City Limits and science series NOVA.

“You know, a public television show that is in an amazingly beautiful natural space with amazing acoustics that features the quality and musical culture we have here in Middle Tennessee,” he said.

Authenticity

If the series gets picked up, Cumberland Caverns would surely benefit from the exposure. But Bluegrass Underground has already proven to be a boon for business. The Caverns saw a 20 percent increase in visitors during the show’s first year in production and a
40 percent increase the following year. Cave manager Teddy Jones said the uptick in the cave’s ticket sales wasn’t solely due to the show, but that a good portion of new attendees were guests of the production. (Fans can bring their ticket stub from the concert and get a discount on cave admission.)

“A lot of folks say they’d never been to a cave or thought about going to a cave . . . until they saw their favorite band was playing there,” Jones said. “It’s given them the opportunity to see what we call ‘the beautiful underground world.’ ”

Before Bluegrass Underground set up shop in the volcano room, Jones said the area was used for Christmas parties and as a lunchroom for visiting schoolchildren. Now that, as Jones said, “the room is being used to its full potential,” he and Mayo hope to expand its reach even more, eventually opening the space to other genres. Their one condition: The music should reflect its natural surroundings.

“I really want to promote musical authenticity,” Mayo said. “We’re in this age of Auto-Tune and being able to use a mouse to go fix things, and there’s kind of a backlash against that. It’s like, ‘What about real people who play real instruments and have real talent?’ I want to present that.”

CAVE FACTS

Cumberland Caverns is billed as Tennessee’s largest show cave and is about one and a half hours southeast of Nashville in McMinnville, Tenn., 333 feet below the surface of Cardwell Mountain.

The cave was discovered in 1810, and parts of the cave constellation were originally known as Higgenbotham Cave and Henshaw Cave. Cumberland Caverns opened for business in 1956. Over the years, creature comforts including bathrooms, handrails, steps, a snack bar and three-quarter-ton crystal chandelier have been added inside the cave’s volcano room to better accommodate visitors.

The internal temperature of the cave remains at a near-constant 56 degrees with 99 percent humidity regardless of the weather outside. In addition to hosting Bluegrass Underground, the cave offers walking and adventure tours and is also available for birthdays, banquets and weddings.